Waeglabs and Softbank Vision Fund

The Vision Fund under SoftBank has acquired a 47% stake in Wag Labs, a dog walking agency startup, with an enterprise value of $650 million and an investment of $300 million. After that, two executives were dispatched, but the situation remained sluggish even after nearly two years, and after selling half of the stake to Waeg in December of last year, it is said that it eventually sold all of the stocks.

Wagrabs is a startup founded by the brothers Joshua and Jonathan Viner. With celebrities such as singer Mariah Carey and Olivia Munn funded, it became popular as a dog walking agency app in Hollywood and expanded its service to 100 cities across the United States.

In January 2018, when SoftBank Vision Fund made a major investment, veteran Hilary Schneider takes office as CEO instead of siblings. It continued to expand, such as opening a call center in the Philippines in mid-2018 and in Phoenix, Arizona in the fall, but in early last year, it closed its office in Hollywood Hills, where it was in charge of customer service, fired employees in large numbers, and then moved the counter to imprisonment with low labor costs. As executives were replaced by San Francisco or Silicon Valley figures, like the CEO, the early Hollywood colors gradually faded.

However, switching to Silicon Valley does not mean that technology will change rapidly. Wagrabs was just a service-on-demand app everywhere, and CEO Schneider struggled to answer questions about pet technology. It was pointed out that the technical outlook and future plans that this will happen in the future are only talking about growth and have less concreteness.

Amid the lack of technology, Wagrabs’ market share fell from 23% in early 2018 to 16%, and sales in the second quarter of 2019 fell close to 12% year-on-year. Expected overseas expansion also suffered sluggishness and ended with the expansion of 10 cities in the US. On the other hand, the founder brothers, who quit Wagrabs, stepped down from management and launched an investment fund half a year later, and last year founded Wheels, an electric bicycle sharing service.

Anyway, it is pointed out that SoftBank needs to think about the investment method of the Vision Fund as it has suffered problems from WeWork and others.